Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. Granick is the author of the bookAmerican Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It, published by Cambridge Press and winner of the 2016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Granick spent much of her career helping create Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. From 2001 to 2007, she was Executive Director of CIS and founded the Cyberlaw Clinic, where she supervised students in working on some of the most important cyberlaw cases that took place during her tenure. For example, she was the primary crafter of a 2006 exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which allows mobile telephone owners to legally circumvent the firmware locking their device to a single carrier. From 2012 to 2017, Granick was Civil Liberties Director specializing in and teaching surveillance law, cybersecurity, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In that capacity, she has published widely on U.S. government surveillance practices, and helped educate judges and congressional staffers on these issues. Granick also served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2007-2010. Earlier in her career, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California.

Granick’s work is well-known in privacy and security circles. Her keynote, "Lifecycle of a Revolution" for the 2015 Black Hat USA security conference electrified and depressed the audience in equal measure. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security’s Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) has called Granick an "NBA all-star of surveillance law.”

Yesterday, Professor Richard Epstein wrote a post for Just Security recommending unmodified continuation of the NSA’s bulk phone records collection. Today, I responded to his post, and explained why I think Richard's position is a surprising divergence from what I understand his values to be.

Yesterday's report from the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or PCLOB, confirms what Christopher Sprigman and I said back in June of last year in our New York Times Op Ed “The Criminal NSA”. The NSA’s telephone record metadata program, in which it collects the calling records of almost everyone inside the United States, is illegal. Amend that: it’s screamingly illegal. Flat out.

When should courts follow legal precedent and when should the law change? This is a debate that underlies this month’s contrary decisions about the constitutionality of government collection of telephone call metadata under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. And despite this week’s dual holdings in favor of the government—on this issue and on the issue of laptop border searches—a judicial consensus may be emerging that the Fourth Amendment must evolve along with technology and government surveillance capabilities.

Yesterday, I wrote that the report from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies--"Liberty And Security In A Changing World”—suggests reforms that would improve U.S. surveillance law’s protection of the rights of foreigners. My non US-person friends seem underwhelmed, so I thought I’d take a moment to elaborate on the changes I’m talking about. Read More.

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Encryption helps human rights workers, activists, journalists, financial institutions, innovative businesses, and governments protect the confidentiality, integrity, and economic value of their activities. However, strong encryption may mean that governments cannot make sense of data they would otherwise be able to lawfully access in a criminal or intelligence investigation.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

After the Estate of James Joyce refused to allow a scholar to quote Joyce in her book, we successfully defended her right under the fair use doctrine to use the quotes she needed to illustrate her scholarship. After we prevailed in the case, the Estate paid $240,000 of our client’s legal fees.

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Opening brief of Movants-Appellants EFF, ACLU, and Riana Pfefferkorn to the Ninth Circuit in our appeal from the district court's denial of our motion to unseal filings in a sealed case wherein the Department of Justice allegedly sought to compel Facebook to comply with a wiretap order for Facebook's end-to-end encrypted voice calling app, Messenger.

Our cars don’t just take us from point A to point B anymore. They now play our favorite Spotify playlists, read us our text messages, and make phone calls. They may collect audio and video inside and outside a car as well as GPS-coordinates.

Brief of amici curiae ACLU, ACLU of Georgia, and Riana Pfefferkorn in support of appellant Victor Mobley in Mobley v. State, a Georgia Supreme Court case presenting the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for the seizure of digital data stored by a vehicle -- specifically, a car's event data recorder (EDR).

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"“YouTube as a private company is well within its rights,” said Jennifer Granick, a speech and technology expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. But “YouTube will make mistakes, and over-censor.”"

"Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU, explains that the purpose of the law “isn’t necessarily to protect the tech companies, but to protect the American people in having a platform where you can post information and post our stories, because if the platforms were liable for information that their users publish, then they wouldn’t be able to publish that information. They would have to go through some kind of advanced review process.”"

"In a Stanford CIS blog post, Pfefferkorn said she found hope in the opinion. “For one, the court rejected the government’s unfounded attempt to argue that we lack standing to seek to unseal these records at all,” she wrote. “It is well-established that members of the public have standing to seek to unseal sealed court records, and the court refused to depart from that settled law.

"Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told USA TODAY Sports that delayed-notice warrants often lack guidelines to protect bystanders caught during surveillance under a provision of the Patriot Act.

"“Normally we think of the judiciary as being the overseer, but as the technology has gotten more complex, courts have had a harder and harder time playing that role,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re depending on companies to be the intermediary between people and the government.”"

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Jennifer Granick, CIS Director of Civil Liberties will be a speaker at World Affairs 2014.

“The best venue for a timely, honest discussion about our world and where it is going.”

WorldAffairs offers fresh insights and new perspectives on current global topics. This year's program will spotlight the critical issues and countries poised to impact our world and affect our decision making.

This Conference is cordially hosted by Stanford Law School and Peking University, and is sponsored by Tencent, China’s largest Internet company and one of the largest worldwide, and Microsoft, the largest software maker in the world. The main organizers include the China Guiding Cases Project, the Stanford Program in Law, Science, & Technology, the China Law and Policy Association, and the Stanford Law School Programs.

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Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties, is in this episode discussing Stingray technology.

"Truth and Power" highlights Daniel Rigmaiden, the young tech-genius who exposed STINGRAY - a secret government surveillance technology that hacks into your cell phones. All New Episodes - Fridays at 10 p.m. ET / PT on Pivot. Learn more at http://bit.ly/TruthAndPowerPivot.

""The phone companies may already have data retention obligations under the Communications Act, but there's no additional obligation as a result of USA Freedom having passed," says Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said that people aren't really understanding how the Internet is being enforced and legislated because it's become more complicated.